Beyond “Infinite Jest”

Why have David Foster Wallace’s other works of fiction not gotten the acclaim that “Infinite Jest” has?

Photograph by Janette Beckman / Redferns / Getty

What if an author put forth goals for his fiction so intelligent yet modest, so comprehensive yet dignified, that the reader would not—could not—forget them? Something like this happened to David Foster Wallace when he sat for an interview with Larry McCaffery, for the summer 1993 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Wallace talked about rap and postmodernism, his idea of good fiction (William Vollmann) and bad (Mark Leyner), and the shape of the literary landscape. Most memorably, he explained why he was a writer.

People often say things they regret in interviews. Ah, what you wouldn't give to take it back! But this rarely happens in long, literary interviews, where the subject gets a chance to edit the original exchanges in later correspondence. The protocol makes sense: what the interviewer wants is not the subject's first thought, but his or her best one. And the capable McCaffery got that from Wallace, for whom rethinking was essential. Despite his initial protests—Wallace objected to McCaffery that he was “probably the world's worst interview. I really suck”—the time and format were ideal. Wallace was in the midst of writing “Infinite Jest,” and his comments to McCaffery on fiction read like a cheat sheet for the book he had going. “Really good fiction,” Wallace told his interviewer, “could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” An essay by Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” also ran in that same Review of Contemporary Fiction issue, and he used it to make a similar point, calling for a generation of writers who would be unafraid to embrace sentimentality and “endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.” Just after the publication of “Infinite Jest,” Wallace reiterated his plea, with minor variations, in a review of a new volume of a Dostoyevsky biography for the Voice Literary Supplement. The writer America was most missing, he suggested there, would be an avatar of the Russian genius. Together the three pieces declare an exceptionally clear set of goals. As Wallace put it to McCaffery, the novelist's job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Wallace's even-more-quoted summary of the writer's task: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

There's a certain tautology to Wallace's statements: what fiction isn't about what it's like to be a human being? (I'm reminded of Robert Frost's declaration: “Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.”) But let's leave that aside, as critics and readers generally have. The truth is, we know what he means: fiction has to touch us, to enlighten us, even, as Wallace says elsewhere in the McCaffery interview, to “redeem” us. Strong stuff—strong enough that Wallace's pronouncements determined much of the critical and popular reception for “Infinite Jest,” when it came out twenty years ago this month, and have ever since. And there, perhaps, is the problem.

“Infinite Jest” is more or less evenly split between the story of the Incandenza family, dysfunctional proprietors of a tennis academy, and that of the residents of a halfway house for addicts, separated from their luckier counterparts by “a tall and more or less denuded hill.” One houses America's winners; the other, its losers. The two groups rarely interact, and the sections of the book dedicated to them differ in tone: the first is more comic, the second more realist, even heartstring-pulling. The unique feel of the novel comes from this juxtaposition. It's as if Salinger had merged “Franny and Zooey” with whatever sincere Buddhist fiction he was rumored to be working on for all those years until his death. But Wallace's declarations put the spotlight squarely on the sentimental half, and, in particular, on the appealing character of Don Gately, halfway-house supervisor and reformed Demerol addict, a palooka with a soul, who takes a bullet for his charges and then refuses painkillers as he lies in his hospital bed. In his climactic moment, he manages to stay substance-free:

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear. . . . It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. . . . He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. . . . But he could choose not to listen.

“Infinite Jest,” a friend of Wallace's commented to me when I was researching “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” the biography of Wallace that I wrote, reads like “a Valentine to A.A.” Yes, it's a tribute to staying clean on a level with, say, Raymond Carver's “Gravy.” But, in the sections on the tennis academy, it also takes upon itself the more conventional fictional role of glamorizing less-than-ideal behavior. Hal Incandenza, for instance, is a pothead who “can take every iota way down deep and hold his breath forever, so that even his exhalations are no more than slightly-pale and sweet-sick-smelling.” The made-up hallucinogenic drug DMZ, which may ultimately be the cause of his teetering sanity, is described in an endnote as making the user feel like “a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.” In “Infinite Jest,” the devil gets more than a few of the good tunes.

Taking Wallace at his word about his desire for redemptive stories finally turns our attention away from what, twenty years later, may be most special about it: its experimental quality. “Infinite Jest” is a novel about the narcotic power of language—a power so overwhelming that Wallace has to shred narrative into tiny strips to keep it under control. Stories nest within stories; experiences are fragmented and regroup; there are bad jokes and goofy science fiction (giant feral hamsters are marauding through Vermont). The result resonates, as the critic Sven Birkerts savvily noted at the time of publication, with the vibe of the Internet. So where's the problem? Isn't writing about the Internet writing about what it's like to be a “fucking human being,” too? Yes, but not really in the way Wallace meant it. What he understood—and what we understand—as his plan was a revival of a kind of novel that had gone out of fashion, one in which the writer hugs his characters to himself, closing the ironic distance that writers like Salinger had carved into fiction's bedrock. Wallace's goal, as he wrote to Birkerts, daringly, in 1993, was “a kind of contemporary Jamesian melodrama, real edge-of-sentimentality stuff.”

Did he think he had succeeded? Perhaps not. In the letter to Birkerts, the book nearly done, Wallace compares the novel to a story he had published several years earlier, “Little Expressionless Animals,” and worries that he hasn’t gotten past that earlier work’s limitations: “I find it buried—like parts of ‘L.E.A.’—in Po-Mo formalities, the sort of manic patina over emotional catatonia that seems to inflict the very culture the novel’s supposed to be about.” He added, “I have never felt so much a failure.” I'd caution against reading too much into this despair, though. The more I reread Wallace's letters, the more skeptical I get of their overt opinions. Wallace was exquisitely aware of social relations; his letters are a series of stances. Of course, despite his protests to McCaffery, he was a good interview—indeed, a great one. Here, similarly, I think he is ritually offering his nape to the critic-wolf Birkerts, encouraging an important reader to approach him with compassion. Besides, he wrote the note while stranded at O'Hare Airport, a situation that could make any writer despair of his ability to give CPR to what's human.

“Infinite Jest” was published in February, 1996, and critics were split between enthusiasm and doubt, often in the same review. Nearly all, though, praised its prodigious energy. This was new stuff, and it took them a while to catch up. What really propelled “Infinite Jest” into the culture were not the critics but a cohort of readers, many of them in their twenties. The first wave of enthusiasts were bewitched by the book’s pyrotechnics—“It was DFW's lexical genius; no one had really seen it since Pynchon,” Matt Bucher, who runs the Wallace-l Listserv, remembers—more than Wallace's ideas about redemption. But soon a different kind of reader emerged to spread the word, the intense celebrants who carried it like a totem, aided in their interpretation of a crafty, complex story by Wallace's promise of deliverance. “Infinite Jest” owes its diffusion through the culture most of all to this group.

Here's where it gets tricky. Nothing Wallace would publish after “Infinite Jest” would hit such a chord again, though he would go on to put out three other works of fiction. Two came out during his lifetime: the story collections “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” and “Oblivion.” They are very different books from each other, and most of all from “Infinite Jest.” At the core of “Brief Interviews” is a series of Q. & A.'s between an unnamed female interrogator and a number of distorted or impacted men. Responses are terse; anger or anxiety tamp down utterances. “Oblivion” is almost the reverse in style: a maximalist, vocabulary-expanding set of formally complex stories circling around anomie like it was a black hole. Both books have fans, but I think it's safe to say that no twenty-year-old will ever stick either of them in his or her backpack alongside “Infinite Jest” when they go trekking in Nepal. In the end, neither found the sustained audience that “Infinite Jest” did, nor the critical response. And much of the resistance can be traced to the mid-nineties, when Wallace annunciated a glorious and exciting new philosophy of writing as clearly as if he had stuck it on a billboard on Sunset. Critics expected him to pursue it. Faced with “Brief Interviews,” in 1999, Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times reviewer, accused Wallace of writing an “airless, tedious” book, and specifically spoke of her disappointment that it did not fulfill the stated goals of “E Unibus Pluram” to breathe new life into the “deep moral issues that distinguished the work of the great 19th-century writers.” Wyatt Mason, one of Wallace's most incisive readers, finally threw up his hands at “Oblivion,” in 2004, in the London Review of Books: “Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace.” Mason registered a gentle request for something “more generous” next time.

How did Wallace feel being hit on the head by his own manifesto? We don't really know. He never published an essay to refute it, nor gave an interview that served as a corrective. I've never seen a letter where he protested, “That was me then; this is me now.” The novel that he worked on from the time he finished “Infinite Jest,” “The Pale King”—published, posthumously, in 2011—complicates the story, potentially. In it, Wallace tries to make the case that boredom is the only refuge from what he called elsewhere the “Total Noise” of modern society. Parts of the novel are prescriptive, guides to how to live a meaningful life, not unlike parts of “Infinite Jest.” But Wallace never finished the book—indeed, couldn't figure out how to weight its different ambitions. There is, also, an intellectuality to the impulse, absent from Wallace's cheerleading for Gately. That's in part because Wallace, it's fair to say, if one thinks about the life and the work as two expressions of the same impulse (as biographers tend to do), continued to aspire to be Gately—read his famous Kenyon College address from 2005—even if he didn't really want to invent him on paper a second time. And, at least occasionally, he expressed pride in his post-“Infinite Jest” stories, telling the novelist Mark Costello, for instance, that with “Oblivion” he had finally written a book that was free of tricks, gambits, and gags. “I looked straight into the camera,” he told his friend.

Still, I feel a sadness around all of this, a whiff of injustice. As we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the book that remains Wallace's masterwork, out in a new edition with a foreword by Tom Bissell next week, I for one am now much more focussed on the fiction that lay ahead for him, especially the two story volumes. Alongside his first collection, “Girl with Curious Hair,” published in 1989, “Brief Interviews” and “Oblivion” cumulatively make the case for Wallace as one of the most interesting short-story writers of our time. It's hard to remember today just how weird “Brief Interviews” was when it was published, with its proposal to draw individuals entirely from their clinically clipped dialogue. And the various stories in “Oblivion,” superficially about insomnia or the tense tediousness of office life, actually are about the instability of experience. One story has a narrative that meanders from protagonist to protagonist and a climax that feels almost peevishly withheld; it lacks not only a single-entendre principle but a stable point of view. Does it matter if “Brief Interviews” seems to owe more to Gogol than Dostoyevsky and “Oblivion” more to Kafka—or maybe Nabokov? They make you wonder if trying to redeem us was the wrong goal for Wallace all along, or if, alternatively, he simply, having accomplished one thing, set his sights on the next. I don't know, but I hope that when 2019 and 2024 come around, we celebrate those books, too.